"There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although also significant differences."

Well, yeah, differences like we have a good economy, a 220 year democratic history, the Christians lack private militias like the SA or SS, Bush really is not Hitler. Other than that, the "mood" is exactly the same.

Senility is a very sad thing.

Stern gets wheeled out of his managed care facility from time to time to discourse on the evils of modern conservatism from time to time. The last time he complained about American conservative criticism of liberals by comparing American liberals like Teddy Kennedy to people like John Stuart Mill, which would have come as a shock to people like John Stuart Mill.

Now, he compares an authoritarian top-down statist movement like Nazism with American evangelical Christianity which is congregation and individual based and pathologically democratic in orientation. Alzheimer's anyone?

Once again this brings to mind George Grant's remark that, although the left is always predicting the advent of fascism in America, when it actually comes it always seems to descend on Europe.

As a reporter, Mr. Hedges makes a great graduation speaker.

As a graduation speaker, Hedges would be better off performing mime.

All great comments. Nazism is very alien to the American geist. Nazi writers, such as Goebbels, were all over this. They admired our Confederacy as an example of a racial state, which should give the Rebsymps something to chew on, but they understood very well that it can't happen here.

somebody should ask this old tosspot how christianity fared under the nazis.

A nightmare vision. Safire retires and they give his slot to Chris Hedges.

It is amazing how few people in Europe can understand the Nazi movement. What is sadder, though, is the quality of reporting that they get: their newspapers only reinforce the stereotypes that lead to this "Hitler used pencils and so does Bush!" kind of logic. George Soros was up at the top of the list before the election for this crackpot style of reasoning.

That is only a nightmare version for stockholders of the NY Times Corporation.

Naziism was the continuation of German militarism by other means.

German militarism was an outgrowth of Lutheranism, though perhaps not a necessary outgrowth. It was enunciated first in a church (the Garrisonkirche in Potsdam) and Christianity and German militarism were always linked until Hitler tried to delink them.

He failed. A week before he became Chancellor, the archbishop of Cologne refused to offer the Sacrament to uniformed Nazis, a gesture toward Hitler, who was trying to keep the SA out of church. A week after, the archbishop offered it to Nazis in squads and ranks.

The Germans got the message.

But they'd always been militarists, the new ingredient that made them truly evil was applied biology.

Harry: Lutheranism is not Christianity, however, but a surrender of the church to the state.

The defining moment for German nationalism. as viewed by the Nazis, was in the 11th Century, when the Church blocked the original Drang nach Osten on the grounds that the western Slavs, recently converted to Christianity, were no longer fair game for being forced off their land.

You (the "you," you) can trot out all kinds of examples of Christians temporizing and equivocating during the Nazi era, for there were many. The authoratative teaching on the subject is Mit Brennerden Sorge, the encylical condemning Nazism as pagan idolatry.

It would have been nicer, I agree, if the Church had been more explicit in its comdemnation of Nazism, but by the 20th Century it had long been out of the interdiction and depositiion business, for which we may thank Lutheranism, among others. Then too, the policy of using Germany to restrain and weaken Commmunism enters into the equation

Here is a good recent Chris Hedges item from Jim Taranto:

Someone Should Trim the Hedges
Chris Hedges, a New York Times reporter, gave a speech at the annual conference of the Association of Opinion Page Editors, in which he blasted his own paper for being insufficiently anti-American. Chris Reed of the Orange County Register reports on The American Spectator's Web site:

"We're absolutely reviled around the world, as we should be," Hedges said. "Our only friends are war criminals"--a reference, he explained, to Ariel Sharon and Vladimir Putin.

America's amoral, bloodthirsty ways and the hate they generate would be much plainer to the American people, Hedges said, if only so many journalists weren't "trapped" by the government's war clichés and oriented to a Washington-centric view of the world. This group, he said, included his bosses at the Times.

"There was absolutely no interest in my newspaper in presenting the views of the French" as the U.S. moved toward war in Iraq, Hedges said. Instead, there was lots of guffawing over anti-French jokes, which he termed "racist."

Who knew? The New York Times' newsroom is a place where mockery of France is so severe that a heroic, hardy, death-defying war correspondent would consider it tantamount to workplace harassment.